World of books

By A N Wilson

12:00AM BST 27 Aug 2001

THE famous question of "General" William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, has always puzzled me. The devil does not have all the best tunes. A Haydn mass sounds infinitely more beautiful than, let us say, a lyric by the Sex Pistols. And if the weird hurdy-gurdy tunes enjoyed by the Victorian salvationists represent the musical taste of the Prince of Darkness, than we can assume that the devil has a cloth ear.

Transfer the metaphor to literature, however, and you can be faced with a conundrum. Some of the best writers of the past century were, if not devilish, then enthusiasts for political viewpoints which seem indefensible with hindsight. One thinks most obviously of the huge numbers of poets and novelists who keenly fellow-travelled with Lenin and Stalin even after the extent of their atrocities was known. Almost more fascinating to me - partly because defeat is invariably more interesting than victory - are those writers throughout Europe who actively and keenly supported the fascists.

Rose Macaulay wrote a beautiful novel about the English Civil War entitled They Were Defeated. It is about the English royalists. It is too mild a title for a book studying the literature of the far Right in the 1930s and 40s.

A friend of mine in France who knew quite a lot of that strange world has suggested, if I were to attempt such a study, that it should be called Les Damnes. I would only write about writers of the first quality: of Heidegger, arguably the most interesting philosopher of his generation, whose inaugural lecture was attended by a guard of honour and swastika-clad banners; the superb Knut Hamsun ("the most oustanding Norwegian writer since Ibsen", it rightly says on my paperback of that great novel Mysteries), an eager Nazi; of Ezra Pound, the father of the modernist movement in poetry, ranting his appalling nonsense about the Jews over the Italian radio airwaves; of our own dear old Henry Williamson, he of Tarka the Otter and the interminably long but not unmeritorious sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. (Would one include T E Lawrence who was going to see Williamson when he met with his fatal motorcycle smashand was emotionally if not actually what Pound called Dong Le Mouvemong?)

The whole question of which French authors to include would be fraught with difficulty, since a brilliant figure such as Montherlant was cynical and collaborationist but not really a believer in the cause.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine was, however, rather more than a collaborationist. And he could plausibly claim to be the best French novelist of the 20th century. His novel about the First World War, Voyage au bout de la nuit, is one of the best war novels ever written. (He was wounded and decorated for gallantry.) I have just read his most famous novel Death on the Instalment Plan (Mort a credit) which is a sort of Bildungsroman, one imagines wholly autobiographical, about his chaotic upbringing in a squalid alley in Paris.

Celine was a doctor. His merciless depictions of the bodily functions as well as the personalities of his characters is both chillingly brutal and achingly funny. There were moments in Death on the Instalment Plan - such as when they are all being sick on the Dieppe ferry - when one both feels the book is too disgusting to read, but when one literally lies on the floor laughing. His evocation of the hopeless English school to which he is sent and of his oafish adolescent silences is without parallel.

Celine stares into the pit. He sees human life without any illusions. His bitter and furious accounts of how he was treated after the war (D'un Chateau l'autre and Nord) are also painful and painfully funny in equal doses. When he was released from captivity in Scandinavia (whence he had fled to collect royalties, in the company of his wife and his cat) Celine returned to being a doctor in a bleak working-class area on the outskirts of Paris. He was a devoted doctor to the poor, while being eaten up with bilious obsessive anti-semitism and extraordinary anger.

His books are a template of how to write autobiographically, and when you have read them you see how influential they have been. Death on the Instalment Plan is the fourth one I've tried but I now realise it is the one to start with, because it is the most riotously funny, and because it was published before the war, the shadows of the dreadful conflict in which he so fatefully chose the side of the damned had not fallen across his tormented and magnificent imagination.